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Issue Contents Happy New Year! The staff here at Sloan-C is geared up for another great year of workshops, conferences, and research. The 2009 workshop schedule has been posted and the first workshops of the year start next week. There is still time to register for any of these January workshops. We are proud to announce blog entries as a new element in the Sloan-C View. In the "Share Your Views" section, you will find links to blog posts on a variety of different topics. Post comments about these featured articles and discuss with other educators in the Sloan-C community. We hope you enjoy this new feature of our newsletter. As always, we appreciate any feedback you have to improve our newsletter. Please e-mail any questions or comments to sloan-cview@sloan-c.org.
Web 2.0: Toward Transparent Technology
Ray Schroeder
It's hard to believe that the now-ubiquitous term "2.0" is less than five years old. It was in early 2004 that Tim O'Reilly and colleagues coined the term in an attempt to come up with a "catchy" title for a conference that might attract the survivors of the great dot com bubble burst in 2001. Now, Google returns more than 65,000,000 hits for "web 2.0." I have found no truly adequate, succinct definition of Web 2.0, but any understanding of the term must include such descriptors as interactive, participatory, collective, responsive, interoperable, and an underlying presumption that the Web has become a platform on its own, no longer dependent upon a particular computer-based operating system. The movement certainly has taken hold in education with shared online authoring applications, web conferencing, shared desktops, blogs, podcasts and other audio/video applications, social networking, and much more. All of these have the potential to enable us to make the teaching/learning process more engaging and collaborative. We can now open learning opportunities to students across disciplines and even across institutions. A new Web 2.0 trend is emerging. It is creating transparency for these technologies. The Web 2.0 environment is becoming embedded in the way we do things and how those things are displayed. No longer do we need to insert hyperlinks to videos in the text of an article; we can simply insert the player so that an image of the video is in place, waiting for the click of a mouse to bring up the video in context. Searches for terms are embedded in our text. RSS puts articles, blog postings, and podcasts on our desktops without effort. Perhaps the best new transparency technology that is emerging is the Ubiquity project at Mozilla Labs. With the most intuitive keystrokes one can instantly create mashups, associate data from disparate sources, and format everything for instant collaboration. Especially in these very difficult economic times, the advent of Web 2.0 technologies is particularly valuable in education. We are able stretch our resources further, enable collaborations, and better engage students, in most cases without the cost of software and hosting. Yet, we must avoid the temptation to adopt a technology without making the choice based on content and sound pedagogy. Fortunately, one of the most valuable features of most Web 2.0 applications is that they are surrounded by the on-going discussion among educators of ways in which each of these applications is being used around the world. The greatest challenge of Web 2.0 is keeping up with the rapidly-changing environment and all of the emerging applications. It is the challenge of taking a sip from the proverbial fire hose! There are educational technology blogs and podcasts (I publish a couple of those myself), but even they are so active that one can quickly become overwhelmed. One of the very best ways to learn about Web 2.0 technologies that might be a good fit for your content and pedagogical approach is to enroll in the upcoming workshop Learning Online 2.0: 20 Engaging, Interacting and Sydicating Applications.
Learn From the Experts - The Sloan-C 2009 Workshop Series Designing Blended Courses & Building a Blended Learning Community - Jan 12 - Feb 1 A significant amount of learning has been moved online making it possible to reduce the amount of time spent in class. Blended courses attempt to combine the best elements of traditional face-to-face instruction with the best aspects of distance education. Faculty can teach in new ways and students are more accountable for own learning. Click here for details and registration. Getting Started: Online Course Development Basics - Jan 14 - 30 Based on research and the Sloan-C effective practices, this workshop provides the foundation for designing and delivering online courses. Faculty gain enhanced pedagogical knowledge and learn effective strategies for creative, online classroom facilitation. Click here for details and registration. Learning Online 2.0: 20 Engaging, Interacting and Syndicating Applications - Jan 14 - 23 Web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing the way in which instructors engage and interact with students online. Through Web 2.0 applications a whole host of new ways to engage and interact with students has emerged. Wikis, blogs, podcasts, interactive whiteboards, VoIP, tagging, image sharing, discussion rooms, and many more learning tools are freely available to educators. Click here for details and registration. Online Learning - Making the Institutional Business Case - Jan 21 - 30Online and blended learning have flourished over the past decade. Many of faculty and students now crave this mode of teaching and learning, and across the educational landscape world class pedagogies, courses and programs have been created. This workshop explores how we move from informal and grassroots approaches, which fueled the adoption of online and blended learning, to an institutionally sponsored and supported paradigm. Click here for details and registration. Intermediate Second Life for Educators - Jan 21 - 30This workshop will introduce intermediate users of Second Life to various teaching tools useful to educators. This workshop is for the practitioner who is interested in developing skills to support their pedagogical Second Life endeavors. Click here for details and registration. |
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The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is composed of institutions and organizations dedicated to continually improving the quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs, according to their own distinctive missions, so that education becomes a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines. The Sloan-C View is published by Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C™). Responsibility for the contents rests with the authors and not with Sloan-C™. Copyright ©2009 by Sloan-C™. If you have a question or comment, would like to submit an article for publication, or would like to suggest an event to be listed on the Sloan-C View Calendar, please email sloan-cview@sloan-c.org. Materials in the Sloan-C View, unless otherwise noted, may be distributed freely for educational purposes. However, if any materials are redistributed they must retain the copyright notice and use the proper citation. Kindly send an email to sloan-cview@sloan-c.org indicating how you are using the material for distribution. Your privacy is important to us, you can view our privacy policy at www.sloanconsortium.org/aboutus/privacy.asp This issue is being sent to: %%emailaddr%% If you do not wish to receive future issues, please send a blank email to %%email.unsub%% and your email address will be removed from our list. The Sloan Consortium, Olin Way, Needham, MA 02492-1200 | ||||||||||||||||||